I'd say it's more subtle than that. These are all human artifacts, not archetypes. The essential metaphysical first principal and assumtion is that while ontology is nondual, manifestation requires duality…even a mirror you could say…but not merely a reflection, but a complete reversion in the concept…even to the point of inverting the idea of concept itself. All the way. The battle between dark and light, visible and unseen, is so difficult because it's right under our noses. We we one side or the other, side with one side or the other, if we "discover" one side, we become slaves to it. slaves to darkness or slaves to light. we just can seem to see the interdependency of the dual. I think the matrix calls it the land of the real or something. it needs transcending but also including. in practice, it's a much more grittier thing. too much work for most people, particularly when the whole system blocks it by occupying out time and energy.
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“In their famous study of the Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer noted that Europe has two separate histories: “A well known, written history and an underground history. The latter consists in the fate of the human instincts and passions which are displaced and distorted by civilization.” (Coakley, 2000, p. 22) While I might call this referent ‘the matriarchy’, the mere suggestion that there exists another historical timeline unaccounted for is a clear motif of yin, something already always present yet completely invisible and intangible, and is the focus here.
“Kronos forms the awakened counterpole to the static, secluded darkness; as such this is none other than the motion of the night.” (Gebser, 1986, p.172) Here, Gebser is distinguishing between the ideas of temporicity and temporality, one being rhythmic and the other metric, respectively. This is not merely an allusion to the idea of sequence versus structure, but also, and more importantly here, it is poetically suggestive of yin/emptiness motifs through the anthropromorphicism of ‘night’ and ‘darkness’. Those two words are not only motifs on yin but are, as ideas, objectively intangible. We cannot point to night or darkness but we all would agree that they are real. That emptiness has motion and can seclude itself beyond being something secluded as an inherent characteristic is particularly correlated with the idea of emptiness being a passively active agent. While it cannot be contained, that does not prevent it from being the container itself to which we naively point to the lack of content as its fundamental characteristic.
“Progress is also a progression away, a distancing and withdrawal from something, namely, from origin.” (Gebser, 1986, p.41) While this seems like a basic economic trade-off, which it is, trade-offs, at least in this case, are always counterbalanced with an equal weight of emptiness and form. While it might seem obvious that being closer to form is also being farther from emptiness, being farther from anything is precisely a motif itself on emptiness and thus is truly also an increase in emptiness as much as it is in form. In other words, there are no trade-offs in duality. They actually reinforce each other. The polarization of the masculine and the feminine, the mind and the body, the gross and the subtle, is a win-win scenario for the whole of duality and, consequently, evolution.
In that same light of dualistic movement and change really not changing the balance at all, Gebser also says, “it is the beginning of that journey into the ‘emptiness’ whither Mephisto sends Faust, in whose nothingness he ‘hopes to find the sum of the universe’.” (Gebser, 1986, p.393) It is not like filling a glass with water in which the more water present the less space there is. This is a limitation of the observational system. There is more space, but outside the system in the source from which that water came. Even within the glass system, there is an increased lack of lack itself. This involves a bit of linguistic gymnastics, but the hope of finding “the sum of the universe” in nothingness is epitomizes in this liquid analogy which only makes a full glass a more potent geyser of nothingness.
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“Ennui and Divertissement are expressions of man’s search for genuine time. As Pascal writes, man should in fact be able to “sit in his room at peace,” in other words, to have time.” (Gebser, 1986, p.405) This is certainly a reflection on the bias of form which evolution needs, but results in the destruction of previous unions. ‘Ennui’ or boredom is the motif of emptiness here, but Gebser is suggesting an aperspectival perspective that has duality rather than merely temporally exists within or as a form-biasing version of it.
“And, standing up as we do, we are able to see into the distance, the future.” (Keleman, 1981, p. 19) “It was when man stood up that his relationship to the earth became insecure.” (Keleman,1981, p. 21) In these two instances, Keleman is referring to the evolution of homo sapiens but also indirectly to the very act of waking from sleep or from a horizontal perspective. While the references here are not directly concerning duality, the motifs are readily observable. Standing and vertical penetration into form and greater perspective like the use of progress by Gebser results in a similar trade-off. There is also a hint at the masculine here which suggests that penetrating vertically is also a horizontal fleeing, the second being needed to take perspective but which results in the insecurity and risk with which the masculine is burdened.
“In the deepest, highest, wildest part of yourself, you intersect Infinity, you are one with the radiant Divine, you are the luminescent Essence of everything that exists, the blazing realization of which brings such a shattering relief that henceforth you might never stop laughing. Or crying-at that point, they mean pretty much the same thing. But the ultimate joke is simply that You’re It.” (Wade, 2004, p. xi) This is a wonderfully poetic quote by Ken Wilber which I think is suggestive of the feeling had upon transcending dualistic conceptions. Understanding emptiness, I believe, is part of that process. Beyond aesthetics though, Wilber points to the binary through the laughing and crying motif. I see the crying as a motif on emptiness. It usually follows a breaking point in which we move down almost as if in penitence. Personally, there is a release of control of the body and the strange sensation of moving out of form almost like losing control of an avatar. Wilber is suggesting that suffering and joy are merely two sides of a coin which we are missing by biasing one side over the other.
“The great 'uncaused cause' that theologians have long speculated lies both everywhere around us and also within us, and of whose freedom our own is claimed to reflect, is not so bad a description, after all, of what may actually be the case.” (Satinover, 2001, p. 189) Satinover presents the linguistic motif of ‘uncaused cause’ here. I am intrigued to join in the linguistic play meditating on the idea of an ‘un-affected effect’. Not only is he presenting both a motif on emptiness and a motif on form in this phrase, he is also directly suggesting with the resultant idea that the very absurdity of the cause/effect duality makes it metaphysically fallible yet still real. Here, however, I only see that he speaks of transcendence without inclusion.
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“It is something resembling what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were full, as if silence were a noise. It is something one can also feel when one thinks that even if there were nothing, the face that ‘there is’ is undeniable. Not that there is this or that; but the very sense of being open: there is. In the absolute emptiness that one can imagine before creation-there is.” (Levinas, 1985, p. 48) Levinas takes the work out of describing how I see the motif as this is a quote directly on this very subject. There is nothing. Whether he is talking about emptiness as noun or reducing emptiness as adjective into a noun is a potential conflict. Regardless, he is directly on some trail of crumbs.
“What matters to me in this notion of the feminine is not merely the unknowable, but a mode of being which consists in slipping away from the light…In existence, the feminine is an event, different from that of spatial transcendence or expression which go toward the light; it is a flight before the light. The way of existing of the feminine is hiding, or modesty.” (Levinas, 1985, p. 67) Here, Levinas is not only directly addressing motifs of emptiness again, he is specifically relating them to Yin. While he perceives this from his perspective as fleeing, he does not see the intention behind the slipping away with is to Seduce rather than Flee unless the feminine feel threatened. Deducing seduction and submission as power motifs of the feminine is a short conclusive hop.
“To ground an authentically free society nothing less is necessary than the metaphysical idea of ‘secrecy’.” (Levinas, 1985, p.79) Secrecy, being a motif on emptiness, is generated for both positive reasons of maintaining wisdom and negative reasons of subversion of power directly resultant by the hedonistic desire of freedom in form. Ironically, a society free from slavery requires its citizens to be slaves of freedom. It’s one thing feminists and Republicans seem to have in common.
“‘Soft countries,’ [King Cyrus] said, ‘breed soft men. It is not the property of any one soil to produce fine fruits and good soldiers too’…The difference between firm bodies and soft bodies was the difference between rulers and slaves.” (Shigehisa, 2006, p. 141) The great Persian king’s response to a consultation about moving to the mountains or into the plains of conquered lands was wise as he unconsciously understood the way in which duality is biased in the law of the wild. The different types of lands, their fruits, and the polarities of bodies which emerge from the relationship with the land motif on duality. Beyond that, there is also a suggestion about the role of the masculine when conditioned by external forces of nature controlling evolution of the species. Fight or Flight are subtly suggested as the tradeoffs of each choice.
“Freud made the mistake of treating consciousness as if it were a thing rather than an event, of making it a noun instead of a verb…Consciousness takes the form of its container.” (Combs, 2002, p. 227) This is an interesting idea of Combs. That consciousness is an event gives it more of a connotation of an emptiness motif. An event is not merely intangible in space, but also in time as it is temporary even if constantly autopoetic. It is less clear here if the motif suggested can be assumed as of the emptiness of the subtle and duality or of the casual membrane between duality, but the connotation is that the history of psychological understanding has been plagued with suffering because of not understanding yin rather than a yangic oligarchy. At the very least, they are in equal proportion, the lack of understanding Yin and the contradiction of understanding Yang absent from relationship with an understood Yin. In that same sense, Freud might not be completely wrong here, but only as the other side of the coin from Jung.